Twin brothers of separate mothers

One of us is a battle tested, recently retired career Army man who is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. The other is a former peace and social justice activist with portfolio who rose through the Green Party’s California ranks before taking up FOSS evangelism with a vengance.

One of us lives in Texas, where the stars at night are big and bright (clap four times here), while the other lives on the Central California coast, where — and it’s a law, I think — every sentence must end with the word ” . . . dude.”

One of us swears by KDE, the other prefers GNOME but really has an affinity for Xfce. One of us calls the operating system “Linux” out of laziness. The other makes a point of referring to it as “GNU/Linux” because the “GNU should get its due.”

Ken Starks and I have our differences. I would be willing to bet he doesn’t think Texas cheated in the Rose Bowl when they beat USC for the national championship a year ago (they did), nor do I think he would agree with me that the former Texas governor cheated in the 2000 election to win the presidency (he did ). Ken grew up a Cubs fan — anyone who knows me knows how much I detest the Cubs (’89 NLCS, anyone?) — but he now follows the Houston Astros, while I live and die, mostly die, with the San Francisco Giants.

Yet it’s safe to say that Ken and I are united in one thing: Promoting Linux (as he’d say) in the home desktop/laptop and small business environment; that, and making sure everyone knows they have FOSS options to their proprietary computing experience.

My introduction to Ken — I haven’t actually met him in person yet — came after what I thought was a slight in a Blog of Helios of one of my heroes, Abbie Hoffman. Yes, for those of you keeping score at home, Ken is the ever-outspoken helios. He and I started exchanging e-mails afterward, discussing — among other things — how to get GNU/Linux (thank you) in front of everyday people who would benefit from being out from under the thumb of Microsoft’s monopoly.

A result of these discussions is our partnership in HeliOS Solutions, where I do what he does in Texas on the West Coast, down to initiating a Komputers4Kids program in Felton. Another result is the project called Lindependence 2008, which we had discussed ad nauseum starting late last summer and had refined through the fliter of The Tux Project in the meantime.

So if you were to tell me a few years ago that I’d be teaming up with a Army vet on a project to save the digital realm for FOSS, I would have laughed myself into a new pair of underwear. If you were to tell Ken that he’d be teaming up with a tree-hugging, pony-tailed hippie, he’d probably have the same reaction.

Yet here we are, and that’s where we should be: United for the operating system, whatever we choose to call it, and united for the promotion of FOSS programs that work as well, and in some cases better, than proprietary software it should replace.

If our partnership is a testament to anything, it shows that promoting GNU/Linux and FOSS transcends background, upbringing and politics. In fact, it even transcends sports in general and, as much as I hate to admit it, baseball in particular.

(And, Ken, Texas did too cheat in the Rose Bowl . . . )

(Larry Cafiero runs HeliOS Solutions West in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

Related

If you want to call getting your butts handed to you by Vince Young “cheating”…

Talk about one man making a difference.

Well, you are licensed to call it anything you like. Because in the end, only one thing matters.

Scoreboard Dude…scoreboard.;-)

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Jim Tate

May 7, 2008 at 7:05 am

Ken is a ex Doggie ??
I never thought and ole Marine like myself would say he respected a Doggie !!
Keep up the good work Ken.

Jim Tate
Indianapolis In.

Nuno Zmas

May 7, 2008 at 7:59 am

I’m definitely closer to your political stances than Ken’s.

I do tend to prefer the term GNU/Linux over Linux for the sake of accuracy, though i reckon that it is not an appealing brand name :)
However, like Ken, i prefer KDE over GNOME on the desktop front.
Finally, in spite of our ideological gap, i find most of Ken’s promotional work inspirational.

Regardless of “credo” (and cradle), there’s a place for all sorts of “configurations” in the common cause we have embraced.

TK

May 7, 2008 at 8:45 am

Gotta love it!

In the midst of naysayers and accusers, Linux advocacy needs to still trudge on. It’s like trying to shut out Tokyo Rose when someone comes up with a good idea and others, who really aren’t going to lift a finger anyway, want to trounce all over it.

Scoreboard, schmoreboard — if you mean to tell me that Vince Young made that touchdown when he was clearly out of bounds at, like, the 2 — as all the replays show — then yeah, you guys won. But I’d prefer to let history decide . . . :-)

[This is not to say that I’m a fan of USC — the University of Spoiled Children — but it was a classic California-Texas matchup so I had to go with the Trojans.]